@njion I've spent a lot of time on figuring this out (for, I assume, similar reasons), and I've found a way that works fairly reliably for me at least: relaxing all my muscles (is a thing that can be practiced) and then trying to make my brain deliberately drift away into nonsensical thoughts (by rejecting logical thought and following weird tangents at rapid pace), and after a pretty short time my body just goes "oh huh I guess we're in sleep phase now, better put the rest to sleep" and I'm asleep!

Can go into more detail about how to practice this, if wanted - but the short version of it is that I'm emulating the first phase of sleep to kick off the rest of the process